Making Sense of the Paranormal

1 Making Sense of the Paranormal: A Platonic Context for Research Methods Angela Voss Judging by the number of academic conferences, research centres and publications now focussed on ‘paranormal’ experiences, it is clear that there is both an upsurge in scholarly interest in this challenging field and a wide variety of methodologies harnessed to address it.1 From psychical research and parapsychology, anthropology and social sciences, to literature, film and the arts, transpersonal and depth psychology and experiential frameworks based on participator observation, a vast range of extraordinary and anomalous phenomena is open to investigation by all, whether sceptic or sympathiser. However, whilst this can lead to a refreshing display of interdisciplinarity, there is also a danger that a lack of discrimination concerning the merits or appropriateness of methods used to address this non-rational realm may result in a ‘free for all’ hotch potch of contending positions and convictions, with no clear rationale with which to assess the deeper philosophical or epistemological issues involved. I am suggesting an approach to these issues which may inform and elucidate usages and engagements with the paranormal through providing a framework which both recognises multiple ways of knowing, and also situates them within a coherent whole. This model is essentially derived from Platonic and neoplatonic philosophy. Platonism has been denounced by the positivistic strand of twentieth century philosophy and science, partly because of its association with fascism and communism (Hedley 2008: 269-282) but mainly because it champions the potential of noetic cognition, a mode of perception which tends to be denied, if not destroyed, by the stronghold of the rational mind (Atkins 2011, McGilchrist 2009: 347, Stove 1991: ch.7). However writers such as Nelson (2001), Kripal (2010) and Shaw (2011) call for scholars to intelligently explore hidden dimensions of experience through building bridges between the public discourses of scepticism and the private ones of authentic anomalous experience (Shaw 2011: 18). I posit that the adoption of models derived from pre-modern religious philosophy may do this through preserving the mystery of numinous encounters whilst also providing route maps for their exploration. Plato presents a radical vision of the initiatory potential of philosophical enquiry, one which goes against the grain of the Aristotelian focus on the primacy of objective, empirical observation. Within his dialogues Plato combines both dialectic and mythological narrative in order to articulate the complementary roles of rational analysis and revelatory illumination within a scheme of human knowledge which is teleological, i.e. progressive in terms of the education and consciousness of the human being. It is my suggestion that the most effective methods for examining non-rational phenomena might extend beyond both empiricism and objectivity to incorporate the supra-rational cognitive faculties recognised by Platonic epistemology, i.e. the active imagination and the intuitive intellect. 1 How one defines ‘paranormal’ depends on one’s definition of ‘normal’. For the purposes of this essay I am using the OED definition: ‘supposed psychical events and phenomena ... whose operation is outside the scope of the known laws of nature or of normal scientific understanding.’ 2 Rational methodology alone tends towards quantification and analysis within the limits of its own epistemological field of vision which is a fundamentally counter-intuitive one. It asks ‘how’ and not ‘why’ in relation to seemingly inexplicable events, for which it seeks demonstrable causes or cognitive mechanisms. I intend to unlock the limitations of this essentially left hemispheric perceptual framework, exhaustively researched by McGilchrist (2009: ch.6) by raising the question of the mode of perception required to experience paranormal events as meaningful, and what their ontological status or ‘verity’ might be within a wider frame of reference. Central to this issue is the concept of analogous knowing or adaequatio famously formulated by Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae I, qu.21), as ‘the truth is the adequation between the intellect and thing’ (veritus est adaequatio intellectus) - that different modes of cognition are appropriate for different dimensions of reality, and that what the individual sees and understands as ‘true’ will depend on the congruence between the level of consciousness and the thing perceived. This would raise the question of the researcher’s own affective engagement with the subject, and would require a willingness to release the hegemony of the rational mind. I am certainly not suggesting however that a participative approach to paranormal reality should exclude clear and critical thinking - indeed the 21st century researcher can no longer assume the ultimate truth of a divinely ordered cosmos, nor can he or she simply make naive claims for paranormal experiences as ‘real’. Before we delve into the Platonic mysteries, I will give a brief thought to the problematic of paranormal studies within the academy. In our society, forms of divination and ‘psychic’ practices such as mediumship tend to bear the brunt of condemnation as irrational or superstitious (i.e. with no intellectual foundation). For the past four hundred years or so the paradigm established by Enlightenment philosophy has been dominant in our universities, according to which matters of the spirit (qua spirit) are placed firmly outside the remit of acceptable scholarly investigation. Geoffrey Cornelius, in his study of divinatory hermeneutics, has shown how Immanuel Kant was seminal in destroying the possibility of spiritual knowledge as ‘truth’ (Cornelius 2009: ch.1). Cornelius regards Kant’s early work Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766) as a critical move to establish the impossibility of attaining objective knowledge of the spirit world. Here Kant ‘brings into sharp relief the intellectual revolution bound up with the rise of scientific method ... through an extensive philosophical analysis [he] deconstructs and disavows both spirit-philosophy and an initiatory occult philosophy founded upon it.’ (Cornelius 2009: 26) Kant confronts head-on the problem of delusion in sensory experience and articulates the crisis in the nature of thought when it finds itself confronted with non-rational experience. In deconstructing Emanuel Swedenborg’s spirit philosophy, Kant relegates the entire realm of symbolic or spiritual knowledge to ‘negative epistemology’, that is, ultimately unknowable (Cornelius 2009: 41). Even more worrying for Kant is the tendency to assume knowledge of spiritual matters by concocting fantasies and false or deluded interpretations, which he calls ‘surreptitious concepts’ (Walford and Meerbote 1992: fn. 2, 320 cited in Cornelius 2009: 32-33) so that all intellectual discrimination is lost. The philosopher, says Kant, should stay in the clear skies of positive knowledge, ‘cut his cloth to his own powers’ and not venture into realms which will forever remain clouded opinion. Now in fact we may agree that Kant is right in stating that the truth status of the spiritual realm lies outside the order of positive knowledge, and that most attempts to speak of it in rational terms are bound to demonstrate its lack of any solid epistemological premises within those terms. This has become the pervasive modern paradigm of 3 scientific knowledge which now claims supremacy. But in denying that a spiritual or transcendent realm can or should be known at all, in different ways or by different perceptive faculties, this assumption negates the pre-Enlightenment model in which the radically ‘other’ dimension of spiritual or divine reality is indeed knowable. Such knowledge requires a ‘turn’ away from sense perception and quantitative analysis to another mode of seeing which is essentially symbolic or metaphoric. This mode is understood in Platonism to be primary, arising from a deep ontological identity between the human soul and its ground of being. In severing rational thinking from these ‘praeter-rational’ roots and thus relegating them to the domain of the ‘irrational’ or ‘superstitious’, what were once seen as the higher faculties of the soul have become subverted in what Joseph Milne has termed the ‘ontological inversion’ of Enlightenment thought (Milne 2002: 5). The telephone wires have been cut, as it were, between gods and humans as knowledge becomes redefined in purely empirical terms. In this light, it is easy to see why attempts to ‘prove’ paranormal phenomena using the methods of ‘positive thought’ such as data collection will go nowhere, because at a fundamental level, we are talking of phenomena that subsist outside the very manner of thinking which requires proof. And this is where the post Enlightenment thinker simply does not go.2 However, Kant is clearly fascinated by Swedenborg’s exact clairvoyant knowledge of a fire which broke out in Stockholm, whilst he was at a dinner party forty miles away (Walford and Meerbote 1992: 2.355-6, Cornelius 2009: 42-6). This episode raises the crucial issue of the ‘unique case’ of paranormal experience and the impossibility of assimilating it into a rational paradigm. Cornelius maintains that ‘the sceptical move that cancels the unique case remains constitutive of mainstream academic and philosophical opinion, especially when it comes to paranormal phenomena’ (Cornelius 2009: 47), and indeed we find that since the kinds of unique cases we are dealing

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